Tools

Sheryl Crow, Weston Burt

When: Sat., Aug. 3, 8 p.m. 2013Price: $59-126

As the recent documentary Twenty Feet From Stardom demonstrates, even the most legendary backup vocalists in pop music don't typically ascend to glorious solo careers. Sheryl Crow, who got her start singing backup on Michael Jackson's Bad world tour, is a major exception. Her rise to pop stardom wasn't instantaneous; the record that made her career and may still be her best, Tuesday Night Music Club, took a year to take hold. Once it did, however, Crow rose quickly to major star status. Perhaps inevitably, the light touch and rootsy insouciance of her debut got lost along the way, replaced by a mainstream gloss, albeit attached to damnably catchy songs that dominated the airwaves all the way through 2002's C'mon C'mon. Now, two decades after Tuesday Night Music Club, Crow has survived cancer and Lance Armstrong. On her latest release, Feels Like Home, she leans deeply into the country music that has always been an essential element of her songs and her dusky alto phrasing. With Weston Burt.
—David Klein